Aviation safety expert John Cox helped investigate the fatal crash of Air France flight 447 in 2009. More than 200 people were lost in that crash, considered one of the worst accident in French aviation history. Researchers now believe a stall was caused by iced-over instruments and two copilots with no training in manual aircraft handling at high altitude. They tipped the nose of the plane up, causing it to lose lift and speed as it climbed, instead of down, which would have increased the speed and prevented a stall.

BOSTON — How are advances in understanding the human genome leading to the development of more effective treatments for disease? John Quackenbush, professor at Harvard School of Public Health and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, explains how recent technology is providing new insight into the nature of tumors, and how to detect early warning signs of the gene mutations that lead to cancer.

Quackenbush also discusses the complexities of treating breast cancer that have been unearthed through genetic research: despite the fact that the cancer occurs in a specific body part, the role that specific genes play in causing the disease can be incredibly varied, resulting in the need for different kinds of treatment for different kinds of tumors.

Here's one scientist with a passion for ICE: Alison Criscitiello is studying glaciology in the EAPS program. Her work takes her to Antarctica, where she studies sea ice and measures ice cores. Check out photos of her work in this video:MIT Tech TV
]]>Fri, 02 Mar 2012 18:18 PM +0000http://www.wgbh.org//articles/Dr-Gary-Small-Preventing-Alzheimers-Disease-5699
crabchick/Flickr)
]]>http://www.wgbh.org//articles/Dr-Gary-Small-Preventing-Alzheimers-Disease-5699

BOSTON — Alzheimer’s disease currently afflicts 5 million Americans; one American is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s every 70 seconds. There is no known cure, and the suggestion that Alzheimer's can be prevented is deeply debated within the scientific community — can doing crossword puzzles, for example, really help stave off the degenerative effects of the disease? Dr. Gary Small, UCLA neuroscientist argues that there are in fact steps we can take to at least delay the symptoms of mental decline. Here, he offers tips for keeping the brain healthy through exercise, diet, and stress management that may at least result in better quality of life. View the full lecture on WGBH's Forum Network.
]]>Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:02 PM +0000http://www.wgbh.org//articles/Using-Social-Cues-For-Survival-5652
]]>http://www.wgbh.org//articles/Using-Social-Cues-For-Survival-5652

This family was perfectly happy to have a robot care for children. But then again, they're fictional. (Hanna-Barbera)

BOSTON — Think of how reliant we are on technology. You may wake to the morning alarm on your smartphone, then check email on the same phone at breakfast. In the car, you’re helped by GPS.

We are so engaged with automated systems that we don’t think about it — until something goes wrong. Look around work when the internet goes down and witness frustration, anger and sudden desperation.

So we pick up the phone for help. And we’re greeted with… yes…an automated voice.

If you’ve called a customer helpline in the past decade, chances are you’ve spoken with a non-human voice created by Nuance, the largest independent vendor ofspeech recognition technology. The company is based in Burlington, Mass.

The tone of that automated voice matters, said Peter Mahoney, Nuance’s chief marketing officer. “There’s a lot of tuning you can do to the voice. Sometimes you need to be a little bit more quiet and helpful, sometimes you need to be cheery,” he said.

“We’ll test the voices implemented in the system to see how people react. And you can really tune these things up and down based on the scenario that you’re in.”

Now, Nuance knows we just want to press zero and speak to a live person. So the company has turned speech synthesis into an art, devoting hours of research and testing to create subtleties of speech and tone in the voice systems… so we don’t react negatively.

EXTRA: Turkle: "Customer service systems are the places where we're being trained."

And that is a problem, according to MIT professor of technology and society Sherry Turkle. She’s the author of the book “Alone Together,” a skeptical take on our lives in the digital realm.

“Sophistication in voice recognition and the amount of energy that’s going into the fluidity and the nuance and the tone of artificial speech is to make us more comfortable with a world where we will be happy to have artificial intelligence as first as our tellers and sales assistants and finally as companions,” Turkle said.

As big a leap that may seem from yelling at some voice recognition technology, Turkle thought it’s important to stop ourselves and ask why we demand so much from technology.

Think about areas such as caretaking for the elderly, and nannies for child rearing. Do we want robots to do these personal things?

“Why do we want to be so comfortable having robots in this job — in areas where people are the only ones who really should be there?” Turkle said.

Phil Ridarelli is the real but recorded voice behind many customer service lines, from tech support for a multinational computer company to ordering a pizza.

Ridarelli works for Interactions, a company based in Franklin, Mass. Interactions adds real people to the mix, but you never speak with them. Instead, the company’s “intent analysts” listen in on your phone calls and they send the correct automated response as soon as they figure out what you’re calling about.

The responses sound so realistic that when callers ask, “Are you real?” there’s a recording of Ridarelli saying “No, actually, I’m a pre-recorded automated response system designed to help you with all your needs.”

When the real Ridarelli recorded these prompts, he pictured himself sitting in a call center.

“We want it to sound like a character, a person. So that when you call up, you can actually imagine the individual who is sitting on the other end of the line, helping you out,” he said.

That’s a lot of time and energy for fake conversations and predetermined empathy.

EXTRA: Turkle: "We have to get very good at how we draw the lines."

These companies that create voice recognition systems try to make these interactions simpler for their clients’ customers — that means us — while keeping costs down. But Turkle thinks some things aren’t meant to be simplified.

“Human beings are trained to know a conversation when they’re in one. And my fear is that we’re losing that sense,” she said. “Conversations are complicated. They should not be simplified.”

We may be too sensible to let a robot raise a child, but the next time you ask your smartphone a question, or follow your GPS’s instructions, think about how much faith we put into a system. Because we don’t want to end up like Dave in the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” permanently silenced by a robot.

]]>http://www.wgbh.org//programs/Maria-Hinojosa-One-on-One-12/episodes/Kevin-Bales---Free-the-Slaves-25157
]]>Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:03 PM +0000http://www.wgbh.org//articles/The-Rude-Belt-296
If you cut in line at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, others may think, 'What a jerk,' but they’ll also think, 'He’s clearly desperate for fine cheese.
]]>http://www.wgbh.org//articles/The-Rude-Belt-296"""If you cut in line at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, others may think, 'What a jerk,' but they’ll also think, 'He’s clearly desperate for fine cheese.'""

I have this theory, which looks better and better to me the faster my money dwindles on the bar, that you can define any American region according to four factors: whether it has real winter, whether it’s bumpy or flat, how dry it is, and how rude it is. Let’s consider the last category, rudeness, an essential Boston subject.

Boston is the capital of the Rude Belt. Over the years various causes of the city’s exceptional rudeness have been proposed, everything from a Puritan hangover to the cowpath-based road net. One underrated factor is the feeling of impunity that comes of living in a place full of overeducated types who are unlikely to drag you out of your car and beat you to death for giving them the finger. They might scheme to deny you tenure, but that’s about it. Lack of fear of serious consequences emboldens people around here, especially the overeducated types, to behave like savages in public.

But, whatever the causes, everyday bad manners alone does not put Boston squarely in the heart of the Rude Belt, which extends down the East Coast to Washington and inland no farther than Altoona, Pa.. A more subtle defining Rude Belt trait is how you act when you’re trying to convey genuine urgency and importance to your fellow citizens.

By way of counterexample, take Chicago, where I grew up, well west of the Rude Belt. Chicago’s a bigger and rougher city than Boston but it’s also a place where you look strangers in the eye and say hello, and in Chicago you signal urgency with excessive politeness. If you burst into a White Castle and say something like, “Excuse me, I don’t mean to make a scene and I’m sorry to disturb you, but I was just in a car accident and I need some help,” the people there will take your formal tone as an indicator that you mean business.

Now, here in Boston you would take a different approach. In a similar situation, you’d burst in and say, “What’s the matter with you? Some idiot crashed into me and I need some help right now! What part of ‘get off your ass and give me a hand’ don’t you understand?” And you’d curse at least five times in the course of saying that. Rude Belters would be thinking, “If this wasn’t serious, he wouldn’t be so rude. We better get help.”

The same logic applies in non-emergency situations. If you don’t use your turn signal on Comm Ave or you cut in line at Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, others may think, “What a jerk,” but they’ll also think, “She must really need to get where she’s going,” or “He’s clearly desperate for fine cheese.” As Rude Belters, they’ll see you as a person of substance to be reckoned with and even grudgingly deferred to.

We could all be a little more polite as we go about our business in Boston. But next time you have an emergency on your hands, remember that in the Rude Belt turbo-rudeness works like cultural lights-and-sirens. You can politely bleed to death, or you can be a jerk about it and live."
]]>Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:15 PM +0000http://www.wgbh.org//articles/This-weeks-science-podcast-from-PRIs-The-World-222
Join science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee on a weekly tour of science news from around the world.
]]>http://www.wgbh.org//articles/This-weeks-science-podcast-from-PRIs-The-World-222Join science reporter Rhitu Chatterjee on a weekly tour of science news from around the world.
]]>